No bookkeeping knowledge needed for Quickbook, Really?
7 January, 2008 (11:39) | Quickbook | By: Cecilia Leung
Are you one of those small business owners who find it difficult to use Quickbook and start looking in all these Bookkeeping 101 tutorials? A lot of new business owners purchased Quickbook for the reason that they promote “no accounting nor bookkeeping knowledge needed”. But is it really? In the large part I would agree with intuit marketing, which Quickbook does provide users a tool to do 90% of data entry and generate accurate accounting reports and journals without the knowledge of bookkeeping. The tool allows users to do everything from issuing sales receipts, deposits, pay bills, to handling employees’ payrolls, filing sales taxes, without having to know any bookkeeping. The 10% however, will require bookkeeping knowledge (the debit and credit rules and how to balance them). Unless you and your employees are very good at Quickbook, it is quite possible that you, or your employees, would make the wrong entries. Due to the Quickbook system, it automatically balances your book in the right place as you do your data entry, so the system will not know if you bunch garbage. However, a lot of clients come to see me with a Quickbook report which he/she doesn’t believe the number is accurate. For example a client came and showed me that the petty cash is significantly higher then what he really has, but bank account is significantly less. After investigation, we realized his bookkeeper entered all the cheques received and cash earnings into petty cash account. Assigning to the wrong account is the most frequent problems for Quickbook users.Bookkeeping knowledge sometimes are needed to trace this kind of problems. If you don’t even know the basic accounting terminologies, such as asset, liability, equity, the reports most likely will not make much sense to you. Without bookkeeping knowledge, it is hard to detect and fix problems.The 10% also includes things that Quickbook requires you to do manually, such as capital depreciations, paying dividend to shareholders, etc. Although Quickbook provides instructions on how to do these things, they are generally very brief. Without basic bookkeeping knowledge you canl expect to have some learning curve.
At least it is much easier than doing your bookkeeping from scratch, or better yet not having to pay expensive bookkeeper or accountant to do everything for you. You might still need to consult a professional, however with 90% of the work done, 10% will significantly lower your professional expenses.
